's fire. But the stern of the _Didon_ smote with a crash on
the starboard quarter of the Phoenix; the ships were lying parallel;
the broadside of neither could be brought to bear. The Frenchmen,
immensely superior in numbers, made an impetuous rush across their
forecastle, and leaped on the quarter-deck of the Phoenix. The marines
of that ship, however, drawn up in a steady line across the deck,
resisted the whole rush of the French boarders; and the British
sailors, tumbling up from their guns, cutlass and boarding-pike in
hand, and wroth with the audacity of the "French lubbers" daring to
board the "cocky little _Phoenix_," with one rush, pushed fiercely
home, swept the Frenchmen back on to their own vessel.

On the French forecastle stood a brass 36-pounder carronade; this
commanded the whole of the British ship, and with it the French opened
a most destructive fire. The British ship, as it happened, could not
bring a single gun to bear in return. Baker, however, had fitted the
cabin window on either quarter of his ship to serve as a port, in
preparation for exactly such a contingency as this; and the aftermost
main-deck gun was dragged into the cabin, the improvised port thrown
open, and Baker himself, with a cluster of officers and men, was
eagerly employed in fitting tackles to enable the gun to be worked. As
the sides of the two ships were actually grinding together the
Frenchmen saw the preparations being made; a double squad of marines
was brought up at a run to the larboard gangway, and opened a swift and
deadly fire into the cabin, crowded with English sailors busy rigging
their gun. The men dropped in clusters; the floor of the cabin was
covered with the slain, its walls were splashed with blood. But Baker
and the few men not yet struck down kept coolly to their task. The gun
was loaded under the actual flash of the French muskets, its muzzle was
thrust through the port, and it was fired! Its charge of langrage
swept the French ship from her larboard bow to her starboard quarter,
and struck down in an instant twenty-four men. The deadly fire was
renewed again and again, the British marines on the quarter-deck
meanwhile keeping down with their musketry the fire of the great French
carronade.

That fierce and bloody wrestle lasted for nearly thirty minutes, then
the _Didon_ began to fore-reach. Her great bowsprit ground slowly
along the side of the _Phoenix_. It crossed the line of the second
af